For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, ...
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For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. This book explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The book examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the custom of burning paper money has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology.Less

Burning Money : The Material Spirit of the Chinese Lifeworld

C. Fred Blake

Published in print: 2011-09-30

For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. This book explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The book examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the custom of burning paper money has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology.

This chapter explores one of Late Antiquity’s most maligned artists: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius (“Optatian”). Optatian’s works resonate against earlier Hellenistic traditions of picture-poetry ...
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This chapter explores one of Late Antiquity’s most maligned artists: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius (“Optatian”). Optatian’s works resonate against earlier Hellenistic traditions of picture-poetry (so-called technopaegnia). But Optatian’s exquisite artefacts, framed around an encomium of Constantine, also materialize early fourth-century aesthetic concerns: they operate against the backdrop of new literary forms (including the cento), and shifting visual cultural traditions (above all the new symbolic languages of early “Christian” art). The chapter explores Optatian’s kaleidoscopic works through three thematic lenses: first, by probing their “materialist aesthetics”; second, by analysing the critical concern with “signs” (signa)—that is, with entities that slide between words and images, Latin and Greek, and different frameworks of semantic exegesis; and third, by considering Optatian’s writings as fragmented (and fragmentable) spolia, forged from the past but also self-consciously “new.” “POP Art”, the chapter concludes, paints an extraordinarily graphic picture of a world in cultural, intellectual and theological flux.Less

POP Art : The Optical Poetics of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius

Michael Squire

Published in print: 2017-01-26

This chapter explores one of Late Antiquity’s most maligned artists: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius (“Optatian”). Optatian’s works resonate against earlier Hellenistic traditions of picture-poetry (so-called technopaegnia). But Optatian’s exquisite artefacts, framed around an encomium of Constantine, also materialize early fourth-century aesthetic concerns: they operate against the backdrop of new literary forms (including the cento), and shifting visual cultural traditions (above all the new symbolic languages of early “Christian” art). The chapter explores Optatian’s kaleidoscopic works through three thematic lenses: first, by probing their “materialist aesthetics”; second, by analysing the critical concern with “signs” (signa)—that is, with entities that slide between words and images, Latin and Greek, and different frameworks of semantic exegesis; and third, by considering Optatian’s writings as fragmented (and fragmentable) spolia, forged from the past but also self-consciously “new.” “POP Art”, the chapter concludes, paints an extraordinarily graphic picture of a world in cultural, intellectual and theological flux.